Washington [428]
The Quaker memorials ended up stillborn in Congress. In late March, under Madison’s leadership, legislators quietly tabled the proposals by deciding they lacked jurisdiction to interfere with the slave trade prior to 1808. “The memorial of the Quakers (and a very mal-apropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep” and will not “awake before the year 1808,” Washington informed Stuart.20 His failure to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to air his opposition to slavery remains a blemish on his record. He continued to fall back on the self-serving fantasy that slavery would fade away in future years. The public had no idea how much he wrestled inwardly with the issue. His final comments to Stuart on the Quaker petitions are complacent in tone, designed to conceal his conflicted feelings: “The introductions of the [Quaker] memorial respecting slavery was, to be sure, not only an ill-judged piece of business, but occasioned a great waste of time.”21
In April, shortly after his noble defeat over the slavery issue, Benjamin Franklin died. He was the only American whose stature remotely compared to that of Washington. During his final weeks Franklin had insisted that liberty should extend “without distinction of color to all descriptions of people.”22 In his will Franklin paid a typically ingenious compliment to Washington: “My fine crabtree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a scepter, he has merited it and would become it.”23 After the Senate voted down a motion to wear mourning for Franklin, Jefferson turned to Washington for an appropriate tribute: “I proposed to General Washington that the executive department should wear mourning. He declined it because he said he would not know where to draw the line if he once began that ceremony.”24 One wonders whether, after the Quaker petitions, Washington had more than presidential etiquette in mind in the decision. The country was curiously devoid of public eulogies to Franklin; the National Assembly in Paris outdid Congress in its tributes, as the Count de Mirabeau paid eloquent homage to “the genius who liberated America and poured upon Europe torrents of light.”25
Washington very nearly followed Franklin to his grave. On Sunday, April 4, he reported in his diary: “At home all day—unwell.”26 Two days later he sat for a second portrait by Edward Savage, commissioned by Vice President John Adams. Unlike the earlier Savage portrait done for Harvard, which showed a man of magisterial calm, this one presented a far more troubled man, the left side of his face dipped in shadow. With a double chin protruding over his jabot and a prominent bag drooping under his right eye, he has a deeply unsettled look. People gossiped that a mysterious fever had gripped the president. “I do not know the exact state of GW’s health for a day or two last,” Pennsylvania congressman George Clymer wrote on April 11, “but it is observed here with a great deal of anxiety that his general health seems to be declining. For some time past, he has been subject to a slow fever.”27 Georgia congressman Abraham Baldwin agreed. “Our great and good man has been unwell again this spring,” he told a friend. “I never saw him